Qantas Loyalty partners
with Accenture to launch
Qantas’ new digital business:
Qantas Golf Club
such an aggressive time frame. This team
worked closely with the Qantas Loyalty
business to interpret the solution requirements,
translate them into working software using
an Agile approach, as well as build the
necessary integrations between the new
product and existing loyalty systems. The
requirements were translated into working
software through eight short sprints (a
delivery period of usually two to three weeks
per sprint) through the Agile approach, a
process for iterating design and build activities
as a timeline progresses. Agile proved to be
successful in closely aligning the business
objectives with technology delivery.
Client profile
The Qantas Group consists of four divisions:
Qantas Domestic, Qantas International,
Jetstar and Qantas Loyalty. Accenture’s
client, Qantas Loyalty, is one of the leading
loyalty businesses in the country. Several
years ago Qantas Loyalty began looking for
strategic growth opportunities relevant to
its core Frequent Flyer program and has
subsequently delivered new products/
services that add value to the member
base. These businesses include Qantas Cash
(pre-paid travel money facility), Qantas
epiQure (wine retailer), Qantas Golf Club
and Aquire (business rewards program).
Qantas Loyalty also includes an employee
loyalty business, Accumulate, as well as
Red Planet, its media service, analytics and
research business, and analytics and actuarial
consulting business Taylor Fry.
Opportunity
Qantas Loyalty continually seeks to provide
additional benefits to members in compelling
ways as well as to create new revenue
streams. One opportunity it pursued was
the significant correlation between the
most active and valued frequent flyer
members and their interest in golf. To this
end, Qantas Loyalty created a brand new
online community—the Qantas Golf Club,
offering members the ability to earn Qantas
Points while purchasing tee times, entries
to golfing events and golf holiday packages.
The new program involved partnering with
Golf Australia, the governing body for golf
in Australia for golf handicaps, and MiClub,
a leading Australian golf club software
vendor for tee time bookings.
To enable members to make the various
purchases, however, Qantas Loyalty needed
a technology solution—completed and
launched—by the conclusion of the Australian
PGA Championship—the height of Australia’s
golf season—which was only four months
away. After a review of potential technology
providers, Qantas Loyalty selected to team
with Accenture based on its in-depth
understanding of the company’s business
model, full breadth of website development
capabilities, Agile experience and demonstrated
track record in successful project delivery.
Solution
For the technology solution, Accenture
proposed the development of a new Qantas
Golf Club website on Qantas Loyalty’s
recently deployed Liferay® portal management
platform to enable integration to a tee time
booking engine, handicap management
system, event management software and
Qantas Loyalty systems for authentication,
points processing and payment.
To address these complex requirements on
an aggressive timeline and accelerate the
development of the solution, Accenture
quickly mobilised a distributed delivery
team on the ground at Qantas’ offices,
whilst leveraging the Accenture Delivery
Centre in Cebu, Philippines to provide the
required development scale to deliver in
To set a foundation for successful delivery,
the overall delivery approach centred on
four key concepts: DevOps for efficient
deployment and operation, Agile processes
for an iterative and flexible delivery approach,
preservation of the core Liferay portal
capability to ensure future maintainability
and support, and a mobile responsive design
to ensure that the same portal design
would work on both desktop and mobile/
tablet form factors.
DevOps
For the purposes of productivity and quality
control, the project team leveraged Accenture’s
expertise to set up a DevOps approach for
Qantas Golf Club. DevOps is the automation
of delivery and development that helps
deploy from the build environment into
the testing and production environments
automatically. It introduces a great deal
of control and automation around the
development process, which allows developers
to quickly program and push code out for
testing almost immediately as opposed to
the conventional approach of accomplishing
the same by implementing lengthy cycles.
In alignment with Qantas’ Loyalty’s cloud
first strategy, Accenture stood up an efficient
and open source standards-based code and
environment management solution on Amazon
Web Services, with automated build and
deployment. In this way, the Accenture
team was able to quickly perform code fixes
and deploy them for retesting or quickly
develop new functionality and deploy on
nearly a daily basis. DevOps allowed the
testing team and the business to see
continuous progress throughout a week
rather than waiting one or two months to
review results. This approach helped accelerate
the development cycle and gave the team
the ability to focus on delivering functionality
in a consistent and replicable way.
Agile
Accenture worked with Qantas Loyalty
to tailor a lean Agile Scrum process that
would allow the team to work efficiently
with the business over the duration of the
project. Scrum is an iterative and incremental
software development approach where a
development team works as a unit to reach
a common goal. Agile was the effective
methodology to use to fully engage across
the functional team and rapidly develop
technology that was in line with the business
objectives and strategy. It also allowed for
flexibility in addressing more than 200 user
stories capturing the original 1,200 business
requirements as the project progressed and
still meet final objectives. Accenture conducted
workshops and briefings to orient all relevant
teams on Agile processes and to create a
regular feedback loop for improving the
process as the project progressed.
Liferay portal
It was determined that the new Qantas
Golf Club platform would be best served by
leveraging the same platform as the Qantas
Points website, which was built on Liferay,
an open source, enterprise-level portal.
Accenture worked with Qantas Loyalty to
understand the core requirements of the
Qantas Golf Club platform and deliver
them through an embedded Web content
management system, portlets and hooks.
Some custom components were built to
extend the portal management platform,
enabling functionality needed for the golf
club website. Accenture was thus able to
enhance the portal management platform
without changing any of the core code to
enable the solution to be compatible with
existing plug-ins and easily maintained into
the future.
Mobile responsive design
Mobility was a key consideration for the
design and build process, and it was important
to be able to build a design that was
“responsive”—that is, able to respond to
the size of any screen in use automatically
and ensure that the same code worked on
desktop, tablet or mobile devices. Leveraging
its in-depth capabilities in this area, Accenture
created mobile responsive themes and
templates for all content management
system (CMS) content based on design
mock-ups from Qantas Loyalty’s online
marketing agency. The Accenture team focused
on ensuring that the design worked on
mobile devices and could also scale correctly
to desktop resolutions.
Mobile responsiveness was also applied
to all pieces of custom code (portlets) to
enable complex functionality such as the
tee time booking views and process to work
on any device. With only one set of code,
the responsive design approach also helps
facilitate ongoing website maintenance.
“IT projects are measured on
whether they are on time, on
budget, or on quality—experience
has taught us that compromise
in at least one area is required,
but Accenture have shown us
that it’s possible to deliver a
project and hit all three goals.”
Rachel Yangoyan
Executive Manager Loyalty Services
Qantas
Results
With Accenture’s help, Qantas Loyalty was
able to launch the new Qantas Golf Club
loyalty program in time for the conclusion
of the Australian PGA Championship. The
website was launched to 2.1 million frequent
flyer customers, resulting in approximately
900 concurrent users browsing the site
at its peak. More than 12,000 members
joined the Qantas Golf Club within the first
24 hours.
Accenture delivered the project with a
superior level of quality for the Qantas
Loyalty internal support team. The key to
successful project delivery was the use of
Agile. Moreover, the Agile practices and
DevOps frameworks for build, test and
deployment automation have been adopted
and incorporated into the Qantas Loyalty
business, helping to replace manual
processes and enable future delivery to
continue in an efficient way. In addition,
Qantas Loyalty can easily edit and update
content across the site, helping to make
sure content is formatted and presented
consistently on an ongoing basis.
Qantas Loyalty was extremely satisfied with
the results. As Rachel Yangoyan, Executive
Manager Loyalty Services at Qantas, noted,
“IT projects are measured on whether they
are on time, on budget, or on quality—
experience has taught us that compromise
in at least one area is required, but Accenture
have shown us that it’s possible to deliver a
project and hit all three goals.”
About Accenture Digital
About Accenture Interactive
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Accenture is a global management
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The relationship between Accenture and Qantas in the
engagement described in this article is that of independent
contractor and its customer. The parties did not form any
other relationship for this engagement including a partnership
or joint venture.
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